The proportion of married couples who divorce: past patterns and current prospects

This article provides estimates of the proportions of marriages which ended in divorce for the different groups of couples who have married since the 1950s. Over one quarter of all couples who married in the late 1970s and early 1980s had divorced by the end of 1994. As well as giving the overall proportion of couples married in a given year who subsequently divorced, estimates are provided of the corresponding proportions for different subsets of those couples--according to each partner's marital status before marriage, and age at marriage. For some of the higher risk groups--bachelors and spinsters who married as teenagers and divorced men and women who remarried in their early twenties--the proportions who had divorced by 1994 had reached over 40 per cent, and in some cases just over 50 per cent, amongst those who had married between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally, a life table analysis is carried out to estimate the proportion of marriages which would end in divorce were the duration--specific divorce rates to remain unchanged at their 1993/94 levels. On this basis, two in five marriages would ultimately end in divorce; just under one half of couples would celebrate their silver wedding, whilst the average length of marriage would be 26 years.